Page 54 - Hard Goals

Heartfelt 45

100 percent to a self-serving cause. And your best employees
might even quit you to go work at Google.

EXTRINSIC CONNECTION

Let’s say you’ve exhausted your options for developing an
intrinsic or personal connection to your goals. Or you’ve got
both intrinsic and personal connections to your goal, but you
still need something more. Are there any other options? Well, if
you remember Roland Fryer, the Harvard economist studying
whether fi nancial incentives will motivate kids to learn even
when there are crack vials on the front steps of the school, you
need to fi nd something, anything, to get you motivated. And the
emotional connectivity that arises when you desperately want
the payoff that comes at the end of a goal isn’t as lame as some
critics make it out to be. Yes, you should exhaust every attempt
to fi nd an intrinsic or personal connection, and not make fi nan-
cial rewards your only, or default, option (Google and others
showed why this is true). But extrinsic rewards do have their
place, and if used effectively, they can help get you started.
There are those folks who will argue against extrinsic
rewards, and even go as far as to say they can hurt your com-
mitment to a goal. Take, for example, a study done in Wash-
ington State of 1,200-plus people who were trying to quit
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smoking. One subgroup of study participants was offered
a fi nancial incentive to use some smoking cessation self-help
materials. What was found was that the fi nancial incentive got
people to use the self-help materials, but because it supposedly